A Seed of Modernism: The
Art Students League of Los Angeles, 1906-1953

The Legacy of the Art Students
League: Defining This Unique Art Center in Pre-War Los Angeles

Essay by Julia Armstrong-Totten

In 1910 the Los Angeles Times art critic Antony
Anderson wrote that "The Art Students League of Los Angeles, from the
very day of its inception, has always stood for unacademic modernity in
art instructions."[1] In
1929 his successor, Arthur Millier, described the school as a "potent
underground force in California painting."[2]
Both critics were undoubtedly biased towards the League:
the former was the school's cofounder and the latter attended on two different
occasions as a student. Nonetheless, their comments demonstrate that they
thought it was someplace special. In fact, the League left behind a fascinating
legacy, particularly in Southern California, that scholars have only briefly
acknowledged.[3] This is partly
because most of the official records have disappeared, so it has become
a difficult topic to study.[4]
However, the League has no doubt been ignored for decades because of the
ongoing attitude that nothing artistically interesting or significant existed
in pre-war Los Angeles,[5] an
opinion that surfaced numerous times when I was researching this project.
One instance involving a League member occurred when, in early 1971, the
Los Angeles Times writer Art Seidenbaum casually alluded to the time
"when Los Angeles was a cultural desert" in a column which so
incensed Arthur Millier, who was retired from the newspaper by this time,
that he wrote and re-wrote four incomplete rebuttals in his private journal
from that year.[6] Millier's palpable
anger and frustration at Seidenbaum's ignorance reached a crescendo when
he stated:

The nearest I can come to grasping what is meant by this
"cultural desert" canard is that at some time B.S. (Before Smog),
one did not trip over PhDs or even MAs when one poked his head out of his
uncultured bungalow...I hold that the reverse of the silly phrase is true;
i.e. the whole area was jumping with culture until about 1940. Then, pushed
by war and war industry, it began the long downhill slide to its present
state.[7]

Leslie Baird, another League member, mourned the changes
in Los Angeles as well, when he wrote, "It's too bad that the old Art
Students League scattered so early. But those were the days before the great
expansion of Los Angeles. That has ruined the town for so many people, including
myself.[8] Clearly these two thought
more highly of the so-called "cultural desert" life in Los Angeles
than the later more "civilized" life filled with traffic, pollution,
and overpopulation, as described by Millier in one of his essays.

A few years later, similar misconceptions about the early
Los Angeles art scene would appear -- and unfortunately reach a much wider
audience -- in Sunshine Muse, Peter Plagens' 1974 groundbreaking
study on then-contemporary West Coast art. Plagens, himself an artist as
well as an art critic, began his chapter on Los Angeles by making the sweeping
statement "Pre-war Southern California produced little important art,"[9] an outlook that undoubtedly helped to
perpetuate the "cultural desert" myth. While issues of provincialism
in the work produced locally have been addressed elsewhere,[10] perhaps a more enlightened approach by
Plagens and those who have adopted a similar opinion might be to recognize
and celebrate the uniqueness of what was created in Los Angeles in the early
twentieth century, as it represented a certain place and time in history.

Plagens further claimed the main problem facing the earlier
artists was that the widespread city's lack of a centralized art center
hindered the possibility of a significant movement developing at the time.
He rightly observed that without a center, "Artists' out-of-studio
debates, dealing, informal teaching, clique-forming do not take place."[11] However, the need for such a place in
the city was addressed as early as 1906, when eleven local artists formed
the Painters' Club. This group, which included the two founders of the Art
Students League, Hanson Puthuff and Antony Anderson, recognized that "such
an organization...had long been needed in our midst. Many artists of the
town are utter strangers to one another, though they may have sent pictures
to the same exhibitions and lived across the street from one another for
years."[12] Plagens failed
to even discuss this club, which in 1909 would become the formidable California
Art Club, arguably the most powerful art organization in pre-war Los Angeles.
But it was the Art Students League that ultimately became the type of center
that Plagens hints at,[13] at
least according to artist Herman Cherry, who attended the League between
1926 and 1932 before establishing himself on the East Coast. In fact, as
early as 1956, in a magazine article he wrote after revisiting Los Angeles,
Cherry contradicted many of the points Plagens later raised about the pre-war
art scene. Cherry pointed out that "Somewhat like the New York 'artists'
club,' [the League] attracted people from the allied arts, writers, singers,
actors, composers and others who had something interesting to contribute."[14]

Fortunately, Plagens' opinion that nothing significant
was produced by the earlier local artists would eventually be challenged,
notably in 1990 by Paul Karlstrom in the exhibition catalog Turning the
Tide, which enthusiastically presented the work of several early modern
artists active between 1920 and 1956. Karlstrom cautions against such a
narrow point of view and instead demonstrates that at the time under debate,
Los Angeles was a vibrant place, with a progressively developing artistic
community, despite being so spread out.[15] Disappointingly, neither author (nor numerous others, for that
matter) ever acknowledged the existence of the Art Students League or recognized
that it functioned for many years as the type of artistic center supposedly
lacking in the city.

Returning for a moment to the issue of isolation, one might
consider it a problem still facing Los Angeles artists today. Both Karlstrom
and more recently cultural historian Bram Dijkstra have suggested that many
of those active earlier in Los Angeles actually preferred to work alone,
because it gave them a sense of personal freedom in their work not available
in a more artistically structured location like New York, and so for them
the logistical challenges were part of the attraction of the area.[16] League member Nicholas Brigante verifies
this idea in a letter written to Carl Sprinchorn in 1947. After venturing
out to view an exhibition of Marsden Hartley's paintings, Brigante wrote:

We scarcely budge from our perch up here, and I've always
been rather disdainful of going to exhibits and meeting people -- and I
guess I'll suffer in the long run as a consequence of placing myself on
my little ivory pedestal -- and then again it's hard for me to meet people
and it [sic] so easy to remain be-fogged and isolated and keep out of the
swim.[17]

In spite of the testimony of Brigante and others who preferred
to be so independent, there was a flourishing artistic milieu in pre-war
Los Angeles. Since some of the League artists mention that it was quite
easy to get downtown and elsewhere in the area by the red car, we can assume
that distance was not always the issue for them. Therefore, personal motivation
and not a lack of cultural offerings must be considered a primary factor;
evidence of what the area had to offer at the time may today be found in
a variety of sources.[18] The
diaries of Mabel Alvarez, for instance, give a firsthand account of the
life of a Los Angeles artist and confirm that there was a thriving local
art community.[19] Her entries
demonstrate that she was a very active individual who frequently attended
lectures on art, gallery and museum openings, and dinner parties with her
fellow artists throughout the period in question. The Art Students League
was a destination often mentioned in the diaries, as Alvarez attended for
well over a decade, though it should be emphasized that the League was not
the solo outlet for its members. Many of them, including Mabel Alvarez,
were involved with numerous organizations -- in her case, ranging from the
conservative California Art Club to the more progressive Modern Art Workers.[20] But one of the most intriguing places
where artists met, studied, worked, debated, and partied for forty-seven
years was the Los Angeles Art Students League. Because many of the area's
early modern artists participated in the League as either student, member,
or teacher, the school became a mecca, through its exhibitions, social events,
and lectures, for those interested in progressive thinking. Even more importantly,
it was the center of a previously unrecognized artistic movement that thrived
for over twenty years, something unusual in American art of the period.
Both stylistic and intellectual influences stemming from the school turn
up in artworks produced in the 1930s for the Federal Arts Project as well
as the budding movie industry in Southern California.

In 1923 British artist Desmond Rushton (b. 1895) made the
following observation when he visited the League at its location at 115-_
North Main Street: "What a unique place for art students...The co-operation
and the spirit of friendly comaraderie [sic] was refreshing...This was a
revelation of what an art school should be."[21] The congenial atmosphere that Rushton responded to in such glowing
terms was probably one of the greatest influences on those who attended,
although today it is perhaps the most difficult aspect to understand and
explain. However, surviving League artists and those who have passed on
have made it clear that the friendships formed at the school and the experiences
shared there were special and created bonds between many of them that lasted
a lifetime. For example, about a decade after Nicholas Brigante stopped
regularly attending the League, he affectionately recalled some colleagues
at the school in his autobiography by "acknowledging a debt of gratitude
and love to the...men who have assisted and influenced me most in my art
career."[22] More recently,
ninety-one-year-old Kirby Temple, who as a young man started attending the
life drawing classes at the League in 1927, reminisced, "such good
and lasting friendships...!I love to remember those true human beings. No
group in the 'World' can compare. Such an influence on my teenage years!
I was in the presence of thinkers!"[23]

When Stanton Macdonald-Wright took over the Art Students
League in the spring of 1923, a small brochure was printed to advertise
his new role as director.[24]
The opening paragraph described the seventeen-year-old institution as a
"non profit cooperative organization of artists and art students."[25] Macdonald-Wright immediately began implementing
some important changes, such as charging monthly fees and offering regular
classes and monthly lectures to the students, which helped re-establish
the place as a school again. Although the League was originally intended
to be a formally structured school offering evening and Saturday classes
for those who worked and therefore could not attend regular art classes,[26] after the departure of the charismatic
Rex Slinkard in 1913 it had gradually become more of a loosely organized
weekly sketching group. Over the next ten years it survived only because
of financial assistance from two of its devotees: Val Costello, who watched
over the school as a guardian angel his entire adult life, and Nicholas
Brigante, who became its most vocal historian. The latter nostalgically
created a number of images of the Main Street studio, which culminated in
his partially abstract Memories oil painting of 1950 (Memories
of My Art Students League Years - 1913-1923, fig. 1).

Under Macdonald-Wright's direction the League developed
into a sort of graduate school for the students, a place to refine their
drawing skills and their appreciation of color. However, one consistent
idea found throughout its history, despite changes in the structure of the
organization and the style of leadership, was the importance of the friendships
formed among those who attended.

It is known from a 1907 article in the Los Angeles Times
that one of the original goals was to give the League students academic
training in drawing and painting while allowing them the freedom to develop
individually, and another was to provide a place for students to study.[27] Because none of the official documentation
has been located concerning the school's formation in 1906,[28] it is necessary to look elsewhere for
possible sources of inspiration. It seems highly unlikely that the founders,
Antony Anderson and Hanson Puthuff, started an art school they called the
"Art Students League" without some sort of outside inspiration,
and the more established Art Students League of New York, dubbed America's
"first independent art school,"[29] probably served as their model. In order to understand why certain
issues, such as friendship, were important at the Los Angeles school, a
brief background of the New York organization and what made it so different
and worth emulating is called for.

In June of 1875, a group of approximately seventy students
attending the National Academy of Design in New York rebelled against the
academy's decision to close down the school for six months due to financial
difficulties. They also thought that the institution was being unsupportive
of its younger members in a number of ways, such as by denying students
access to the academy's library and consistently favoring the more established
members in exhibitions.[30] These
students rallied together, found a sympathetic instructor to teach them
at a new location, and set about establishing some guidelines to follow.
Highlights in their manifesto included:

The attainment of a higher development in Art Studies;
the encouragement of a spirit of unselfishness among its members; the imparting
of valuable information pertaining to Art as acquired by any of the members
(such knowledge to be made the general property of the Society); the accumulation
of works and books of Art, and such properties and material as will best
advance the interests of the members; mutual help in study, and sympathy
and practical assistance (if need be) in time of sickness and trouble.[31]

The constitution of the New York school developed out of
these basic ideas and they are still followed today. Since Antony Anderson
attended the Art Students League of New York from 1888 to 1891, it makes
sense he would propose using some of their ideas when establishing the Los
Angeles school.[32] While it is
uncertain how closely Anderson and Puthuff followed the structure of the
New York school, they adopted its sophisticated practice of using a live
nude model in class,[33] which
made the Los Angeles League unique among the various art schools and sketching
groups in the city at the time.[34]
Nudity was still frowned upon in Southern California art schools, and having
a nude model consistently available was initially one of the League's biggest
attractions, since working from a cast was a sore point for many artists.[35] Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), for example,
was completely disgusted with this practice; in his autobiography Benton
recalled that "Old Jean Paul Laurens at Julien's looked scornfully
at my efforts to draw, and, to the snickers of the young internationals
about, waved me away toward the casts -- the same damned casts that had
repelled me in the [Chicago] Art Institute."[36] Archie Musick echoed this attitude when discussing what he disliked
most as an art student: "Drawing from the cast...was the worst thing
I had to do."[37]

There were other similarities with the New York school;
at some point the Los Angeles League formed a study library, although today
only a partial selection of books has been located from this collection,[38] and it appears that the idea of promoting
friendships among students was embraced as well. Because of the negative
way in which the National Academy of Design had once treated its students,
camaraderie and emotional support were given high priority by the New York
League and then inherited by those following its standards.[39]

One further piece of evidence regarding the importance
of friendship at the Los Angeles League appears in the circa 1945 statement
of purpose from the Art Students League started by Hideo Date and Benji
Okubo in 1942, when they were interned together in the Heart Mountain camp
in Wyoming.[40] The two artists
knew one another from the Los Angeles League and artistically they thought
alike, both being products of the school and Macdonald-Wright's teaching.
In addition, Benji Okubo had been the last pre-war director of the League
in Los Angeles and presumably he wrote this manifesto from memory. The first
rule given was "to promote art and cultivate friendships among members,"
so the idea of encouraging friendship among the members was at the top of
the list! The subsequent rules must be similar to those established in Los
Angeles, but one unusual category to note is the "special members."
They were defined as "the moral supporters and those interested in
the art[s] but not actually taking the course at the Art Student[s] League."[41] These members were not allowed to hold
offices in the organization but they were allowed to vote for officers and
on any issues. Although none of the names of the Heart Mountain special
members appear anywhere in the document, some known from Los Angeles include
Jack Wells, Frank L. Stevens, Lee Jarvis, and model Henry Clausen.[42] Apparently this idea was unique to the
Los Angeles and Heart Mountain Leagues, as nothing like it ever appeared
in the New York constitution.[43]
Since there is no mention of the special members during the League's earlier
years in Los Angeles, quite possibly Stanton Macdonald-Wright established
this practice when he became director as a way to include his cronies, especially
Wells and Stevens, in the group without having to deal with criticism from
other members.[44]

These special members contributed to the Los Angeles school
in numerous ways, but first and foremost as patrons. All of them formed
collections of work by League artists, and in the case of Jack Wells, this
may have been done primarily to support his friends; Macdonald-Wright claimed
that Wells rarely hung anything on his walls and that most of his collection
was to be found under his bed or in his closets.[45] Wells and Stevens were also generous to the organization; Wells,
who worked for the utility company, made certain the electricity was kept
on when the school could not pay its bills, while Stevens purchased several
books for the League's library,[46]
provided groceries for the school, and often secured tickets for the students
to attend the Hollywood Bowl.[47]
Lee Jarvis acquired works by several of his League friends, and Henry Clausen
was responsible for introducing new members into the organization; he also
had a collection of their work, although these may have been artists' gifts
to their model.[48] Other patrons
included Vivian Stringfield, Dr. Marcia Patrick, Anne Evans, and Wilma Shore,
but all of them studied at the school. Patronage was very important to League
members, especially during the Depression, since most of them were struggling
to survive as artists at a time when society was not overly supportive to
the profession.

But there were other ways in which those involved with
the League supported one another. Since these artists often lived together,
traveled together, and socialized together, they offered emotional and practical
assistance to each other under a variety of circumstances. For instance,
at the height of the Depression, when Donald Totten developed a life-threatening
illness, Kirby Temple took him home, nursed him back to health, and eventually
secured him a job at the beach where Temple worked as a lifeguard.[49] James Bolin took homemade soup to Hideo
Date when he was ill with a cold and rooming at a Japanese boarding house.[50] In fact, in various correspondences Hideo
Date recounted that he had lived with six of his friends from the League
between 1927 and 1942, while he was attempting to paint and remain independent
from his family.[51] Hideo Date
recalled other kindnesses from his League colleagues. For instance, Bolin's
grandfather generously offered to store all of Date's artwork when he was
interned from 1942 to 1945. The artist moved to New York directly after
his release from the Heart Mountain camp, but he had no means to collect
his work and have it shipped east. So Albert King, one of the founders of
the Art Center School, arranged for an exhibition of Date's work there in
1947 and for the school to send everything to New York afterwards.[52]

League members organized other memorial and retrospective
exhibitions for their friends as well. In June of 1940, eight months after
Ben Berlin's death, Lorser Feitelson organized an exhibition of Berlin's
recent work at the WPA Southern California Art Project Gallery,[53] and Albert King organized a retrospective
show of James Redmond's work after he was killed at the Battle of the Bulge
on December 21, 1944. This exhibit, held in July of 1945 at the Los Angeles
Art Association, contained twenty-seven pieces by the artist, including
one titled Siamese Cat that art critic Arthur Millier claimed was
his finest piece.[54] In November
of 1964, a decade after the demise of the school, Leslie Baird organized
a retrospective exhibition of Donald Totten's work at the Esquire Theatre
Gallery in Pasadena, a few months after Totten suffered a debilitating stroke
that ended his career.

They were part of each other's lives on more joyous occasions
as well, such as the intimate wedding, in June of 1932, of League members
Gwain Noot and Fred Sexton, in which Herman Cherry and John Hench were the
witnesses (fig. 2), or the wedding of Lee and Ida May Jarvis, held at Kirby
Temple's house in Palos Verdes in 1946. Most of the guests were friends
from the League and Henry Clausen was best man. They did favors for one
another too. There are, for example, numerous instances of students posing
as models for each other as well as working together professionally (fig.
3). Carl Winter and Albert King assisted Stanton Macdonald-Wright on his
sets at Santa Monica Playhouse in the late 1920s, and Frank Stevens was
a partner for one year, in 1933, at the Lotus & Acanthus ceramics studio
owned by Albert and Louisa King. The friendships established at the League
provided networking avenues that most in this profession desperately needed
throughout their careers.

Sketching trips and traveling abroad were extracurricular
activities at the League, but they were another way in which the members
bonded. Sam Hyde Harris recalled that in 1906 the League's first students
participated in Sunday sketching trips to the Arroyo Seco, near director
Hanson Puthuff's studio.[55] Puthuff
sketched elsewhere with his League students and friends; he often traveled
with Sam Hyde Harris throughout California and Arizona in the 1920s, and
in 1925 he and Aaron Kilpatrick went with Texas artist R. S. Taylor on a
two-month sketching trip to Mexico City.[56] A number of League artists made regular trips to Laguna Beach
to sketch. Nicholas Brigante's first visit there in 1917 with Val Costello,
Jack Wilkinson Smith, and Hanson Puthuff made such an impression on the
young artist that he wrote about the adventure all around his first plein-air
watercolor, Laguna Landscape (plate 2). Years later in an interview
he described Laguna Beach as "a little nothing" and he recalled
skinny-dipping with Val Costello because the beach was deserted in those
days![57] In 1909 Stanton Macdonald-Wright
and Jack Oakey left Los Angeles together to attend art school in Paris,[58] and in 1913 Sam Hyde Harris and Pete
Purcell traveled together throughout Europe for six months to study the
old masters. Other students, such as Rex Slinkard, Pruett Carter, and Bert
Cressey, studied with the founder of the Ash Can school of painting, Robert
Henri (1865-1929), in New York. A few of Stanton Macdonald-Wright's students
journeyed east to study with or meet Thomas Hart Benton, and others made
pilgrimages to France to paint with Morgan Russell; among the former were
Herman Cherry and James Bolin, while Chalfant Head, Anne Evans, Wilma Shore,
Earnford Sconhoft, and Fred Sexton were among the latter.[59] Russell's arrival in Los Angeles in 1931 and his short stint teaching
at the League in 1932 finally gave all of the students who were at the League
at that time the opportunity to meet and learn from this early modernist.

The League was also a social center, with exhibitions,
receptions, and parties a part of the extracurricular activities. During
the formative years exhibits were either held at the Blanchard Hall Gallery
or in the studios of the League.[60]
At a celebration of the organization's one-year anniversary, in April 1907,
the gallery presented a number of accomplished drawings and paintings by
League students. Six months later a number of students were again exhibiting
their work at the gallery, the subjects consisting of portraits done in
pastels and oils and drawings done from life.[61] By August of 1910 the curator of the Blanchard Hall Gallery,

Everett C. Maxwell (1884-1962), reported it was common
practice for the League director to hold annual or biannual exhibitions
right in their studio and that presently 136 sketches were on display in
the larger gallery.[62] After
the League moved to the Main Street studio in 1912, the artists sometimes
participated in group exhibitions around town instead, such as one held
at the Los Angeles Museum in June of 1921 that included the work of Nicholas
Brigante, Val Costello, Lawrence Murphy, Edouard Vysekal, and George Stojana.[63] One of the most historically significant
exhibitions of early modern artists active in Los Angeles was organized
in January of 1923 by some of the League members, calling themselves the
"Group of Independents" (some works were by artists, such as Stanton
Macdonald-Wright, the deceased Rex Slinkard, Thomas Hart Benton, and Morgan
Russell, not associated with the school at the time). This exhibition, held
at the Taos Building on West First Street, brought together a number of
pioneering modernists who asked their audience to respect the work displayed
and try to approach it with an open mind, even if they did not find it appealing.
Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who would re-establish himself with the League
when the exhibition ended, authored the foreword in the catalog and later
managed to stir up a fair amount of controversy by writing a critical review
of the show in Antony Anderson's column in the Los Angeles Times.[64] Today this exhibition is recognized as
one of the first in Los Angeles to feature experimental and abstract work
by local artists, like Ben Berlin and Boris Deutsch, that even the more
conservative artist Paul Swan (1884-1972) pronounced "fine, serious
work."[65] Decades later
Albert King recalled there was another exhibition of the "Group"
in 1925 at the Hollywood Public Library,[66] although the catalog for the first exhibition had announced plans
for a second much earlier, in June of 1923. Presumably the "Group of
Independents" segued into the "Modern Art Workers," who exhibited
at the Hollywood Library Gallery in 1925 and then at Exposition Park in
1926, since their goals were very similar and a number of League members
were involved in both organizations.

In 1928 James Redmond and Albert King formed the League's
own exhibiting club, called the Younger Painters. Many of the participants
were students at Otis Art Institute and it is presently uncertain if they
all attended the League as well. Supposedly the original group was made
up of "certain brilliant students of...several art schools";[67] however, Hideo Date's recollection, which
may have been accurate by the time of his participation in 1932, was that
the group was exclusively made up of League members.[68] Their statement of purpose claimed that these artists were "young
in a sense of growth,"[69]
but it stressed that their work went far beyond that of students, as they
included only more advanced and mature pieces. The group made it clear that
the Younger Painters was strictly an exhibiting club -- not a social club
-- that did not utilize a jury system. They noted that the establishment
typically snubbed the work of younger artists, so they appreciated the support
of the California Art Club, which hosted their first annual exhibition at
the Barnsdall Park Art Center on April 2, 1928. The Younger Painters would
continue to exhibit locally, at the Los Angeles Museum in 1929, at the Santa
Monica Public Library in 1930, and finally at the Hollywood Library in 1932.
By this time a local critic remarked that they were no longer young (although
most were still in their twenties), and that their work was no longer "splashy,"
so the group disbanded.[70] While
the exhibition at the Hollywood Library was their last, the Younger Painters
Gallery appeared the following year at the Stanley Rose Bookstore in Hollywood,
with Herman Cherry as the curator. Decades later Lorser Feitelson vehemently
argued that he started this gallery, but Cherry consistently claimed credit
for its founding and the Los Angeles Record documents his hosting
a group of watercolors by Nicholas Brigante there in 1933, a couple of years
before Feitelson became involved with the space.[71]

Parties were another League tradition that further strengthened
the camaraderie between members. In the early years they were usually planned
in conjunction with the exhibitions held at Blanchard Hall; about thirty
students attended one such event, described as a "smoker," in
1907.[72] While the parties were
typically group events, occasionally they were for an individual, such as
Nicholas Brigante's farewell party given at the downtown restaurant Fioritalia
when he left for World War I in 1917, or the good-bye party Benji Okubo
organized for Hideo Date at the Dragon's Den restaurant when he traveled
to Japan in 1936.

No doubt the most popular social events held at the League
were the flamboyant "stag" parties that took place every other
Saturday night after class. Frank Stevens said they were held on alternating
Saturdays to work around the schedule of the Los Angeles Symphony, since
some of the League members regularly attended those concerts.[73] The students usually took turns cooking,
and everyone paid twenty-five or thirty cents for the meal.[74] Henry Clausen remembered that the food was "supplemented
by Fazzi's grocery-store wine and buckets of good, lethal coffee,"[75] and Albert King noted that Frank Stevens
often paid for those luxury items. The core group was generally made up
of fifteen to twenty-five regulars who became a sort of "clan,"
according to Hideo Date.[76] Outsiders
were welcomed to these intellectual events to spice up the mix -- members
could bring one guest -- and the visitors often included musicians, writers,
directors, actors, and art patrons, such as writer Sadakichi Hartmann, movie
director Frank Tuttle, and actor Lew Cody. The League's big model stand
was covered in newspaper and used as their dining table. The dinner would
end with a ritual of someone putting a match to the paper and then the evening
would progress into a sing-along, while others would play poker. The party
typically ended around two or three in the morning, but sometimes it spilled
over into a Sunday morning brunch at Jack Wells' apartment because of the
intense conversations. Architect Chalfant Head, who attended these parties
prior to and after his travels throughout Europe, reported to Morgan Russell
upon his return to Southern California in 1927 that the "Art Students
League has in my opinion quite gone to Hell! It has become a sort of inane
'arty' place. The famous old Saturday nite dinners end in dirty jokes and
drivel about sex."[77] Herman
Cherry found them intellectually stimulating; he remembered:

I found friends, for the first time in my life, that
thought the way I did. I didn't realize that...there were people like me
that were interested in other things, rather than just existing, or having
fun...they were serious, they talked about philosophy, they talked about
books...[they] were very aware of everything that was in literature, that
was in art, that was in music...I used to go to those Saturday nights and
meet these people I would never have met.[78]

Hideo Date claimed that because of these intimate gatherings
the group "became friends for life."[79]
In fact, the League parties continued long after the
demise of the school -- another sign of the lasting friendships. They were
sometimes held at Robert Boag's house at Redondo Beach, as illustrated by
two photographs, one of a party held in 1949 just before Fred Sexton revived
the League, and another one held ca. 1960, although the core group had grown
much smaller by this time (figs, 4, 5).

Despite the congenial atmosphere that permeated the League,
conflicts were inevitable, especially with so many artistic egos involved,
although the documented problems mainly had to do with the directors. Nicholas
Brigante, relaying the League's early history to Carl Sprinchorn in a letter,
described an incident between the sculptor Charles Cristadoro and the painter
Rex Slinkard in which they struggled for control of the school. The students
had handpicked Cristadoro as their director after the sudden death of Warren
Hedges in January of 1910. Later that summer Slinkard rejoined the League,
full of enthusiasm after his studies in New York with Robert Henri, and
immediately their personalities clashed. Cristadoro greatly disliked the
dynamic Slinkard, since his was a personality the sculptor could not control.
Brigante described Cristadoro as the "quiet, retiring type [who] quickly
gave up the fight and school to Rex" in 1911.[80]
Throughout this episode another League member, Frank
Curran, sided with Cristadoro, and Brigante recalled that these two were
the only members he knew of who were ever antagonistic towards Slinkard.
(Not everyone at the League was pleased with the new director's teaching
methods, though. Conrad Buff quickly became disenchanted with the style
Slinkard had learned from Henri and promptly quit.) Brigante noted that
even Stanton Macdonald-Wright never said anything disparaging about his
former colleague, perhaps because Slinkard was so much beloved by his League
students that his presence and influence lingered at the school many years
after his departure as director.

Stanton Macdonald-Wright, on the other hand, easily made
enemies of both students and colleagues, because he was the "supreme
egotist," according to Brigante, as well as being rather blunt about
his dislikes. Another colleague claimed his attitude was fairly straightforward:
"If he respected you, you got along fine with Macdonald-Wright; if
he didn't, you wouldn't."[81]
But he was reportedly very patient with even the least promising student,
as long as that person was "cooperative and eager to learn."[82] In fact, he very cleverly managed the
egos of the younger talent at the League by individually telling several
of them that each was his most promising student, which also guaranteed
their devotion to him. However, Hideo Date recalled a certain amount of
backstabbing between Macdonald-Wright and instructor Lorser Feitelson --
not surprising, since they were quite competitive with one another, particularly
after Feitelson's Post-Surrealism movement gained national attention.[83] Still, they managed to work together
for a number of years, both at the League and elsewhere. Ultimately, the
school survived these minor skirmishes and continued to thrive, meanwhile
remaining sacred in the hearts and memories of most who attended.

Possibly one of the most amazing aspects of the League's
history is that a unique intellectual and stylistic movement thrived there
for about twenty years, but today very few scholars have acknowledged its
existence. This "Asian-fusion" style lasted roughly from 1923,
when Stanton Macdonald-Wright became director of the League, until 1942,
when Benji Okubo closed down the school because of the forced incarceration
of West Coast Japanese Americans. The style is characterized by a specific
formula that includes a delicate but emphasized flowing outline, perhaps
copied from Persian miniatures, called "linear composition," flat
areas of pure color, sometimes with stylized patterns of design found across
the surface, and specific motifs from Asian art dominating the background
-- typically a large tree, rock, or mountain surrounded by curving foamy
water or clouds. Hideo Date's Still Life from this era is a good
example (see fig. 13, page 10). Often all of this was combined with a skewed
perspective borrowed from Cézanne and/or a Synchromistic palette
gleaned from Macdonald-Wright.[84]
So far at least twenty League artists working in this style in a wide variety
of mediums[85] have been identified,
and there were probably others. It originated with Stanton Macdonald-Wright,
who initially combined his earlier Synchromistic theories and painting techniques
somewhat randomly with Asian-inspired subjects.[86] While a formal manifesto has not emerged, eventually the artist
clarified his goal, which was to blend "Oriental" influence with
"Occidental" ideas to create an entirely new modern art.[87] Some of his followers intelligently reasserted
their own belief in the merging of East and West; for example, in 1933 William
von Herwig said:

The marked influence of the East on our younger painters
I believe is indicative of a new and greater expression in Art, blending
the best of the East with the knowledge of the Wes...I regard the Pacific
Coast as the scene of the new impetus.[88]

Also, like their mentor, some of the non-Asian students
immersed themselves in Eastern studies; James Redmond became fluent in both
Japanese and Chinese, while Donald Totten studied Zen and other Buddhist
philosophies the rest of his life as a result of this influence. Archie
Musick found himself defending the movement's principles in 1932 when he
left the Los Angeles League to study in Colorado with Boardman Robinson
(1876-1952), who had said, "You're not a Chinaman, so why try to paint
like a Chinaman?"[89] At
one point even Hideo Date felt compelled to travel to Japan and further
study his own culture, in order to better understand the developments in
Los Angeles. Eventually he concluded that West Coast artists naturally turned
to the Far East for inspiration, while East Coast artists had instead turned
to Europe.[90]

Other artists associated with the League were interested
in Asian art and sometimes original work was available for the students
to study. Original Ukiyo-e prints were displayed at the Blanchard Hall studio
of League instructor Leta Horlocker in 1910,[91] and Rex Slinkard kept a couple of exquisite Japanese screens as
well as some fine Japanese prints in his studio.[92]

Although League cofounder Hanson Puthuff expressed an interest
in Asian perspective,[93] Rex
Slinkard was the first instructor known to have introduced Asian art to
his students. His enthusiasm would send a young Nicholas Brigante on a quest
to understand and capture elements of Chinese Sung painting in his own work,
perhaps best illustrated in his masterpiece in watercolor titled Nature
and Struggling Imperious Man (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Brigante,
like the League's Asian-fusion artists, did not want to copy directly from
his Eastern sources; instead, he wanted to find a balance between the art
of past and present as a way to create something entirely new. Lorser Feitelson
later described Brigante as the "father of Oriental Art" in Los
Angeles, although he said others tried to claim the title -- presumably
referring to Macdonald-Wright.[94]
But it was clearly due to Stanton Macdonald-Wright and his beliefs that
a much larger and more influential movement stemming from Asian principles
flourished at the League and elsewhere in Southern California.

Another factor to consider in the development of this movement
is that a number of Asian students attended the League throughout its history,
and their welcomed presence no doubt further directed interest to the East.
For instance, Asian elements appeared in Stanton Macdonald-Wright's post-Synchromistic
work of the mid-1920s, but around the time Hideo Date studied at the Kawabata
Painting School in Tokyo in the late 1920s, noticeable changes begin to
appear in Macdonald-Wright's work as well. He had previously painted in
a much looser style, almost crudely combining Synchromistic colors with
some sort of Asian subject, as in the 1923 Chinese Valley Synchromy
(see fig. 7, page 6). His later technique becomes more polished and adopts
the compositional formula mentioned earlier. See, for example, his 1930
Dragon Trail: Still Life Synchromy (fig. 14, page 10). It is difficult
to establish how much the student affected the teacher, and Hideo Date was
typically modest about any influence he might have had on his mentor, but
Date's refined, delicate style resulting from his training in Japan, as
well as his newfound knowledge of the nihonga tradition of looking
to the East and West for inspiration, possibly contributed to the changes
in Macdonald-Wright's style, as well as those of the others involved with
this movement.[95]

Through informal talks, class criticism, and weekly lectures,
Stanton Macdonald-Wright introduced his students to the techniques he admired
most in the old and new masters, particularly Michelangelo and Cézanne,
as well as the purity of approach of, for example, Chinese artists. In a
lecture series given at the League during August and September of 1925,
Macdonald-Wright rather verbosely laid down his fundamental principles on
the importance of balance, color, rhythm, and form in a work of art.[96] (He would also display images by the
artists under discussion and even paint in their styles sometimes to illustrate
a point.[97]) He concluded this
particular lecture series by pointing out the necessity of a "deeper
spiritual content" in an artist's work in order to make the work meaningful;
later some critics thought that he abandoned this ideal in the Asian-fusion
movement. In 1934 the ever-supportive Arthur Millier discussed the progress
of this style in an article about the latest artistic developments in Southern
California. He ardently claimed:

A school of painting which has no parallel elsewhere
in America consists of Stanton MacDonald-Wright and his followers....This
school of painting is not at all understood by Eastern critics. They cannot
see...the destiny of this region [is] to absorb wisdom from beyond the
Pacific. This school has a future.[98]

Two years later, when Macdonald-Wright and some of his
followers exhibited their Asian-fusion work at the Carl Fisher Gallery in
New York, Millier's comment that East Coast critics would not understand
the style was corroborated when one reviewer interpreted it as decorative,
another was openly unenthusiastic about it, and a third claimed that the
idea of creating something modern by turning to the Orient was "far-fetched."[99] Obviously, these critics thought that
something deeper was missing in the stilted but colorful style presented
by the group. Regardless of the lackluster reviews, this pastiche style
continued to flourish in Southern California and ultimately found a wider
audience through the intervention of the United States government, i.e.,
the Works Progress Administration's Federal Arts Project, hereafter called
"the Project."[100]

In 1935, with Stanton Macdonald-Wright at the helm as district
supervisor for the Project in Los Angeles (he later became regional director
for Southern California), the style found a new momentum, since over thirty
artists from the League participated locally, including many of those most
active in the Asian-fusion movement. Some of the work created for the Project
was even executed at the League, such as James Redmond's mural for the Compton
post office, Early California (see fig. 12, page 9) and Donald Totten's
Untitled easel painting (fig. 6).[101]

Macdonald-Wright would eventually be accused of favoritism
towards certain participating artists, although some League artists recalled
they had to submit examples of their work to a committee to be accepted
on the Project. In any event, the Asian-fusion League artists were given
the freedom to continue working in this style, as seen in the mural titled
Landing of Cabrillo-1542, painted by Charles H. Davis for the Los Angeles
County Hall of Records (fig. 7). The most ambitious mural done in this style
was the mosaic titled Recreations of Long Beach, which Macdonald-Wright
and Albert King redesigned in the Asian-fusion style (fig. 8). Other League
artists were part of the larger group of artists who worked on this mural
as well. So by this time, a good number of Macdonald-Wright's students truly
had become his disciples, and they redirected their own beliefs to his ideals.
Together they were working towards a goal of intelligently combining East
and West in their work, although ultimately the movement would end around
1942.

The question of why it ended does not have a simple answer.
First of all, this movement had never really caught on with either the critics
or the general public, even though there were a few other non-League artists
working in the style.[102] The
end of the movement also coincided with the winding down of the Project;
once again these artists had to sell their work. Since the style was not
very popular, some may have turned to more mainstream subjects in order
to survive. Possibly the rising anti-Japanese sentiment on the West Coast
contributed to a move away from using overt Asian motifs. Most likely the
end of the movement occurred because of the breakup of its most ardent followers.
Many in this tight-knit group relocated immediately before or during the
war. Benji Okubo and Hideo Date were interned from 1942 to 1945 in Wyoming,
Donald Totten moved to Washington in 1942 for a year, and James Redmond
joined the Corps of Engineers in 1942 and was killed during the war. Others,
like Archie Musick and Herman Cherry, had previously moved east. Although
some of the Asian-fusion artists directly readdressed Macdonald-Wright's
color theories in their later work, apparently none of them ever returned
to this unique style.

Ideas, both theoretical and stylistic, that had developed
at the League would surface in the later careers of many students. This
legacy is basically two-fold: there is the influence on an individual's
personal style or philosophy, and the influence that they somehow incorporated
into their post-League careers and perhaps even passed along to the community
at large. Certain students responded directly to the school's charismatic
leaders, particularly Rex Slinkard and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, and they
subsequently devoted considerable time and effort to thoroughly absorbing
the lessons they were taught. Others responded emotionally to the congenial
atmosphere, to a place that became a haven for them, and for some students
it was a combination of all of these elements that they would somehow carry
into future.

As previously noted, Rex Slinkard studied with Robert Henri
in New York between 1908 and 1910, and six months after his return to Los
Angeles the young, energetic artist became director of his old alma mater.
Henri's dark, intense style influenced Slinkard's personal style as well
as his teaching, as seen in his undated Reclining Nude (plate 6),
with its dramatic contrasting colors, playing light against dark. It must
be emphasized that Slinkard taught Henri's vigorous style and not his own
mystical experiments with color to his League students. Those progressive
paintings emerged later, when the artist was living on his family's ranch
near Saugus. Slinkard had quit the League in 1913, after removing himself
from Los Angeles society because of a hasty marriage to his pregnant model.
He occasionally turned up at the school to visit and offer advice to the
students, but he only mentioned exhibiting one painting throughout this
period. Consequently, during Slinkard's lifetime the work he is famous for
now was not publicly displayed. His poetical letters to close friend Carl
Sprinchorn discussing the paintings and his life of isolation reveal a sensitive
soul responding to the natural world around him. Perhaps this was an idea
learned from Henri, although the darker elements apparent in some of these
pieces may be linked to the artist's guilt over his scandalous marriage
and pending divorce.[103] Nicholas
Brigante always claimed that Slinkard's final paintings developed free of
any outside influences and that his was the first true modern work produced
by a Southern California artist. However, in the surviving letters from
Slinkard to Sprinchorn, it becomes apparent that he was inspired not only
by his surroundings, but by artists such as Puvis de Chavannes and Arthur
Davies, as well as El Greco. After Slinkard's premature death from influenza
in 1918, retrospective exhibitions were held in Los Angeles (1919) and New
York (1920), and in both cities again in 1929. Ten of his works were included
in the League's 1923 "Group of Independents" exhibition as well.
It was probably these later exhibits of his mystical paintings that inspired
subsequent League artists, such as Mabel Alvarez and Lawrence Murphy, to
emulate his style. Obvious compositional and stylistic similarities may
be seen, for example, when comparing Alvarez's study for the painting Dream
of Youth to Slinkard's The Path (figs. 9, 10). Today it is unknown
if either Alvarez or Murphy had access to the artist's letters, which address
the motivation behind his symbolist style, or whether their response to
Slinkard's work was purely visual. Slinkard's mystical paintings as well
as his poetical writings describing an isolated lifestyle amidst the majestic
California landscape fascinated other artists as well, particularly Marsden
Hartley (1877-1943), who became enamored with Slinkard and his work. In
fact, he and Carl Sprinchorn tried for years, in vain, to publish a biography
of this early modern Southern California painter. Earlier, Sprinchorn had
made the drawing Rex Slinkard RIP, reminiscent of Slinkard's linear
style, to commemorate the passing of his dear friend (fig. 11).

According to Brigante, the spirit of Rex Slinkard remained
at the League long after his departure, and he was certainly forever linked
to the younger artist's memories of the Main Street studio. In 1922 Brigante
did a series of pen and ink drawings in Slinkard's style to commemorate
his time there; the series includes some interior views, the only known
images of this space. Twenty-five years later, a nostalgic Brigante returned
to this topic in three different works, perhaps because he had been absorbed
in revisiting his memories of Slinkard and the school for Hartley and Sprinchorn.
The first two were studies on paper, one done in 1946 and the other in 1947.
In his first "memory" piece, Memories of the Old Los Angeles
Art Students' League, Brigante lets his subconscious go wild, depicting
abstract areas of compartmentalized boxes within boxes formed by bright
colors, perhaps representing different thoughts about the school (fig. 12).
In the second one he reworks his earlier drawings of the interior setup
with easels (fig. 13). He wrote to Sprinchorn about the motivation behind
his second drawing, in which he repeated the inside view of the studio but
with a major change:

It's a place dear to me because there I was in constant
contact over a greater period of time of people I became very fond of --
and of Rex. Each spot [i.e., easel] in the picture that represents a drawing
or painting will be utilized in reproducing in miniature a painting by
each of you whom I respect and admire -- Rex will be in a spot about 2
_ x 4-Using his self portrait...I went thru all of my collection of your
work I have in reproductions...Then one of Val's, and possibly one of Wright's...I
hope to truly make it a picture of Remembrances of things past, if I succeed.[104]

The artist left much of this piece incomplete, except for
his two easel miniatures of Slinkard's self-portrait and Sprinchorn's portrait
of a dancer, but even in its unfinished state one senses Brigante's poignant
attachment to this place and time from his youth. Eventually these two studies
were merged in his final painting of this subject, a semi-abstract landscape
oil of 1950 (fig. 1). This time he combines the compartmentalized sections
of vibrant colors found in the first study with the studio interior of the
second, and together they represent different parts of his memories. For
instance, in the upper right of the canvas is an Asian-influenced landscape,
perhaps signifying the importance Chinese Sung painting held for him at
one time, while below it the viewer is given a distorted peek inside the
League studio on Main Street. Once again Brigante allows us a glimpse into
the importance of the League in his life and career as an artist.

In 1919, when Stanton Macdonald-Wright returned to Los
Angeles from New York and, before that, Europe, he inadvertently changed
the style of many artists working in California. He was personally moving
away from Synchromism, the movement he had cofounded earlier, in Paris,
with Morgan Russell. After their Synchromist work was exhibited in Los Angeles
and San Francisco, other artists in those cities copied the colorful palette,
although few probably understood the theory of choosing color based on musical
scales or "color chords."[105] Macdonald-Wright's students at the League would also paint in
this style, although he apparently never encouraged them to copy it. Synchromism
no doubt appealed to those interested in music or who were musicians themselves,
such as James Redmond, Donald Totten, Earnford Sconhoft, and Hideo Date,
all of whom had a basic foundation in place to help them understand its
complexities. It lingered especially in the memories of Hideo Date, who
was always frustrated with his earlier explorations, and so he decided,
thirty years after he had permanently left Los Angeles and severed contact
with his teacher due to political differences, to re-address Macdonald-Wright's
color theories.[106] Never having
seen Macdonald-Wright's hand-painted color wheels that accompanied A
Treatise on Color, Hideo Date designed his own, adjusting their format
to his ideas, and then he set about exploring the possibilities of color
in relation to notes on a musical scale. Oddly enough, the paintings he
produced from these experiments resemble Macdonald-Wright's later stylized
Synchromist pieces (figs. 14, 15). So both teacher and student later returned
to Synchromism and ended up producing hauntingly similar stylized versions.

Other League students, such as the Bay Area painter John
Gerrity and architects Chalfant Head and Harwell Hamilton Harris, turned
to classic Synchromism later in their careers. Gerrity, who was slated to
head a branch of the League in San Francisco only to have it shut down after
the stock market crash of 1929, continuously returned to exploring Synchromism
throughout his career. For example, his earlier images of large, heroic
nude females inspired by Michelangelo surrounded by a Synchromistic palette
(fig. 16) would evolve into Cézanne-inspired pieces of intersecting
lines and colors. By the late 1960s Gerrity had abandoned the figure for
pure color abstractions, although the basic principle of color creating
form was always evident in his abstract work. Chalfant Head returned to
painting after retiring from architecture, and produced a small body of
work that evokes the theories of Synchromism (fig. 17). Head was probably
reaching back to his studies with Morgan Russell in France, as the formal
arrangement of deeper color tones more closely resembles the expatriate's
personal style. In a succinct analysis of Synchromism's influence on Harwell
Hamilton Harris while he was at the League, architectural historian Lisa
Germany points out that the lessons on color theory learned from Stanton
Macdonald-Wright provided the foundation for Harris's understanding of architectural
form.[107]Harris also referred
to color chords when designing houses, using specific colors around the
trim of doors and windows, for example, to create movement on the façades
of his structures, thus transforming a two-dimensional theory into a three-dimensional
practice.

Stanton Macdonald-Wright's abilities as a speaker were
legen-dary and the topics of his lectures greatly influenced his students
as well. They often mentioned learning about subjects never taught to them
before, and said that he introduced them to a world of knowledge they would
never encounter again. Movie director and actor John Huston (1906-1987)
attended the League in 1923, at the time Macdonald-Wright assumed control
of the school. Huston described the impact the artist had upon him when
he wrote, "S. Macdonald-Wright furnished the foundation of whatever
education I have. He steered me not only in art, but in literature...Personally,
I owe such a debt of gratitude to Wright that I can't begin to express it.
I wish I had done better because of him"[108] Obviously, Huston did just fine, but not as a professional artist,
a career he abandoned in the late 1920s, influenced by Morgan Russell's
constantly precarious financial situation.[109] Macdonald-Wright's distinct style of teaching drawing, with an
emphasis on creating balance and movement, or contrapposto, was also
noteworthy. John Hench, who started working for Walt Disney in 1939 as a
sketch artist, eventually becoming senior vice president of the Imagineering
division, introduced Macdonald-Wright's drawing techniques to the Disney
sketch artists and called them "Mickey's Ten Tips on Drawing."[110] For decades, until his death in 2004,
Hench was the official portrait painter of Mickey Mouse, and a Synchromistic
palette may be seen in some of these images. Redmond, Totten, and Okubo
copied Macdonald-Wright's drawing techniques and incorporated his stimulating
lectures on art history when they assumed leadership of the school after
1932. Furthermore, Benji Okubo extended these teaching methods to his students
at the Heart Mountain League between 1942 and 1945. He taught drawing as
Macdonald-Wright did -- using the same number system to guide students to
develop the balance and flow in a figure, he gave similar lectures on art
history, and he organized exhibitions and parties for the students, precisely
as had been done in Los Angeles, but within the confines of an internment
camp.[111] Donald Totten subsequently
taught studio and art history classes in Southern California, while continuing
to paint and exhibit his own work. Many of Macdonald-Wright's ideas surface
in Totten's lectures to his students, such as this comment:

In the line of [modern] painting descent...I follow from
the impressionists through Gauguin and Matisse, Delaunay, Wright and Russell.
I believe with them that the real contribution to the craft of painting
in the 20th Century is color and that it is possible to build a kind of
visual music using scale and chords.[112]

When Totten turned to Abstract Expressionism in his final
years he abandoned the ideals of classic Synchromism, but the theories on
color that he learned from Macdonald-Wright and Russell were central to
his mature style and personal philosophy. Color theory continued to be important
to other League artists, like Albert King and Herman Cherry, as well as
Academy Award­winning costume designer Dorothy Jeakins, who applied
both the drawing lessons and color theories she learned at the League from
Macdonald-Wright and Benji Okubo to her exquisite clothing designs for countless
movies and theatrical performances (fig. 19).[113] Albert King cofounded Art Center School in Los Angeles in 1931.
He taught there for over twenty years and he was head of their color department.
King became nationally known as an expert in color theory and applied his
knowledge to a wide range of professions, from teaching camouflage classes
during World War II to developing and rediscovering ceramic techniques for
his Lotus & Acanthus studio (fig. 20). Herman Cherry, like some other
League students, claimed that it took him a long time to let go of Macdonald-Wright's
influence, but one lesson he never forgot was how Macdonald-Wright taught
him to see color: it became the means by which he created form in his later
abstract pieces (fig. 21).

From the beginning, Antony Anderson had seen the potential
of the school when he speculated, "The league, it will be seen, is
a school with an idea -- and that idea is also an ideal -- artistic growth
for the individual man or woman who seeks its instruction, as well as the
spread of appreciation and understanding in the community at large."[114] And though the story of the League was
almost forgotten -- perhaps not an uncommon occurrence in a city famous
for reinventing itself -- its influence was quietly spreading out into the
world beyond the studio. One final thought to consider is that most of the
artists who attended the League had the worst generational luck imaginable,
since their early careers were wedged between two world wars and interrupted
by the Great Depression. By the time the United States started rebounding
financially from the Second World War, most of them were middle-aged, no
longer youthful hotshots; there were, as there always are, younger artists
with news ideas out to replace them. The dealer Irving Blum, codirector
of the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, claimed that upon his arrival in Los
Angeles in the later part of the 1950s, the up-and-coming artists were attempting
to extend beyond and destroy, not absorb, what had previously existed in
Los Angeles, and this attitude may have contributed to the League's disappearance
from the local scene.[115] Ironically,
those who attended the school and later achieved some level of financial
success or prominence did so by moving on to another creative profession
or leaving Southern California altogether. Costume designer Dorothy Jeakins,
movie director/actor John Huston, architect Harwell Hamilton Harris, and
New York-based painter Herman Cherry come to mind. Furthermore, as Arthur
Millier noted, Los Angeles as a city had changed dramatically after the
war. New industries brought about a population explosion that resulted in
an urban sprawl extending farther and farther away from downtown. In fact,
downtown Los Angeles was no longer the center of the city; it was just one
of many centers, and it was no longer as popular as it had been during the
heyday of the League.

Ultimately, the League was really nothing more than a studio
and an idea, and it could have easily closed down numerous times throughout
its history. Instead, in the spirit of the original New York League, it
became "one of the prime movers and shakers"[116] in pre-war Los Angeles. Today the Art Students League of Los Angeles
deserves to be acknowledged as an important and progressive center in the
chronicles of the artistic development of Los Angeles.

Notes

1. Los Angeles Times, 16 January 1910, III, 10:3.

2. Los Angeles Times, 8 September 1929, III, 14: 7-8.

3. Nancy Moure's numerous publications on Southern California art provided
the groundbreaking research into this topic; more recently Sarah Vure discussed
the League in her essay found in the exhibition catalog Circles of Influence:
Impressionism to Modernism in Southern California Art 1910-1930 (Newport
Beach: Orange County Museum of Art, 2000).

4. Everything now known has been painstakingly gathered from a wide variety
of sources, but mainly from the families of those who attended the school.
This essay is based on those resources, as well as interviews and letters
from surviving League members. Furthermore, the interviews conducted by
Betty Hoag with those League members who participated in the Works Progress
Administration's Federal Arts Project in Southern California have proven
invaluable to this project. Consequently, more emphasis has been placed
on the atmosphere in the later years of the school. This essay is not intentionally
ignoring the earlier history nor should it be seen as any less important;
unfortunately, there is just far less primary documentation to work with
from that period.

5. The term "pre-war" will be used throughout this essay as
a matter of convenience; it is not quite accurate when referring to the
League, since the school was revived from 1949-1953. However, the heyday
of the institution was during the formative years, from 1906-1913, and under
Stanton Macdonald-Wright's leadership, from 1923-1932.

6. The journal is located in the Arthur Millier Papers, reel 3887, frames
272-290, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. His third and
most lengthy essay mentions numerous concerts, operas, and musical and theatrical
performances, from Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) reading "Phedre"
at the Orpheum Theatre during her last World Tour, to the premier of Otto
Klemperer (1885-1972) conducting Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in the 1930s,
but it is strangely lacking in any information on achievements in visual
arts. Presumably he planned to develop something on this topic, because
in the side column on page 16 of the journal he wrote down the name of one
of his teachers, former League director Rex Slinkard.

7. Ibid., reel 3887, frame 290.

8. Leslie Baird letter to Eva Totten dated 8 February 1988, in possession
of the author.

9. Peter Plagens, Sunshine Muse: Contemporary Art on the West Coast
(New York: Praeger, 1974), 117. In the introduction to the 1999 reprint
of Sunshine Muse Plagens states he did not know very much about the
art produced during the pre-war period and in hindsight regrets such generalized
statements. It should be noted that Plagens was certainly not alone in his
original opinion; this book was chosen to cite mainly because it perpetuated
so many of the typical misconceptions about the art world in Southern California
in the first half of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, this attitude
continues even today, evidenced recently by a writer for the Los Angeles
Times who said, announcing an exhibition in July 2003, "Long before
there was a burgeoning art scene in Los Angeles, Frederick Hammersley was
here": another case of someone assuming the area had very little to
offer artistically prior to 1940, when Hammersley arrived as a student.
See Los Angeles Times Weekend section, 3 July 2003, E2, "Three-Day
Forecast" column.

13. There was a significant difference between the California Art Club
and the Art Students League: the former was an exhibiting and social club,
while the latter was all of that plus a school; despite the fact that many
of the earlier artists were members of both, the educational experience
was no doubt more stimulating and the League provided an environment that
was more open to experimentation.

14. Cherry was in a position to compare the two, as he was part of the
"Club" in New York City. Herman Cherry, "Los Angeles Revisited,"
Arts 30, no. 6 (March 1956): 18.

18. See, for example, Ruth Westphal's article "The Development of
an Art Community in the Los Angeles Area" in her Plein Air Painters
of California, the Southland (Irvine, Calif.: Westphal Publishing, 1982)
or Margarita Nieto's witty compilation "Mapping of a Decade: Los Angeles
during the 1930s" (http://artscenecal.com/ArticlesFile/Archive/Articles1999/Articles1099/MNieto1099.html,
13 April 2007).

19. The diaries of Mabel Alvarez begin in 1909, when she was 18 years
old, and continue on and off throughout her lifetime. She briefly logged
not only the progress of her own work, but also her social and educational
activities, on almost a daily basis. They are on deposit at the Archives
of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

20. See Moure, Publications, part 2, to get an idea of other organizations
and their participants. There were other, less formal groups not cited in
her publication, such as the one surrounding Sadakichi Hartmann at Marjory
Winter's Sargent Court House, which included League artists Ben Berlin and
Boris Deutsch, the Mexican muralists Orozco and Siqueiros and their local
followers, and Lorser Feitelson's students and his followers of Post-Surrealism.

24. Perhaps in order not to scare off prospective students, Macdonald-Wright
is cautiously described as "A young old man speaking a language that
you understand. Not radical, not dull, but interesting."

25. The brochure incorrectly claims that the school was in its twenty-first
year.

26. Many of the earliest students, like Val Costello and Aaron Kilpatrick,
worked professionally as either sign painters or commercial artists.

27. Los Angeles Times, 8 September 1907, II, 2:3-6.

28. Presumably all of the paperwork from the pre-war League was destroyed
after Benji Okubo was sent to the Heart Mountain internment camp in 1942;
most of what we know about the school, especially its formation, appears
primarily in Los Angeles Times articles written by its cofounder
Antony Anderson.

29. Raymond J. Steiner, The Art Students League of New York: A History
(New York: CSS Publications, 1999), 41.

30. For a more complete history of the New York League see Chapter I,
"These Ungrateful Students," of Steiner's Art Students League
of New York.

31. Steiner, Art Students League of New York, 29-30.

32. As a member of the New York League, Anderson would have been given
a copy of their constitution and been obliged to read and sign a contract
as well; consequently he should have been quite familiar with the formal
philosophy of the school.

33. The New York manifesto guaranteed that "the League will form
and sustain classes for study from the nude and draped model" (Steiner,
Art Students League of New York, 30).

34. For further discussions of the early drawing schools in Los Angeles,
see Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, Drawings and Illustrations by Southern California
Artists before 1950 (Laguna Beach, Calif.: Laguna Beach Museum of Art,
1982), 5-6.

35. Both John Huston and Nicholas Brigante mentioned that they had a
plaster cast to work from at the League when necessary, but according to
Brigante it disappeared after Macdonald-Wright assumed leadership. See John
Huston, An Open Book (New York: Da Capo Press, 1980), 28, and Nicholas
Brigante's interview with Fidel Danieli, 28 January 1975, tape 1; tape on
deposit at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

38. These books are housed at the Charles E. Young Library at the University
of California, Los Angeles, and include about 50 publications ranging from
a 1913 National Geographic Magazine titled "The Wonderland of
Peru" to Carlos Carrá's 1925 Giotto.

39. Art Students Leagues appeared in other cities, most of them started
by former students of the New York school, but none of them had any official
affiliation; some of the others were located in Atlanta, Washington D.C.,
Toronto, Chicago, and Philadelphia. This information was sent to the author
by Stephanie Cassidy, archivist at the Art Students League of New York,
in an email dated 20 November 2002.

40. The 1945 date is suggested because the document refers to Mrs. Benji
Okubo as the secretary of the Heart Mountain League; Benji Okubo and Chisato
Takashima married in Billings, Montana, in June of 1945.

42. Hideo Date labeled all of them "good friends of the League"
in a list of members sent to the author on 26 April 2000. Apparently Stevens
did start out taking art classes, but quickly decided it was better to be
a patron and dealer, rather than a painter. See his oral interview with
Betty Hoag on 2 June 1964, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

43. Confirmed by Stephanie Cassidy, ASL-NY, in an email dated 11 July
2003.

44. Henry Clausen recalled the trio as "a colorful updated version
of the 'The Three Musketeers,' and their dialectical jousting was quite
comparable to the swordplay of the said Musketeers." See Henry Clausen,
"Recollections of SMW," in American Art Review 1, no. 2
(January-February 1974): 58.

45. Stanton Macdonald-Wright interview with Betty Hoag on 18 April 1964,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This discussion came
up because Hoag was horrified by Frank Stevens' treatment of his paintings.
Possibly she was referring to a group of Morgan Russell's work that was
later unearthed beneath a house Stevens owned around 1970. Stanton Macdonald-Wright
recounted their history in Maurice Tuchman's "Morgan Russell: Unknown
Paintings," in California, 5 Footnotes to Modern Art History
(Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1977), 11. The circumstances of how and
why Stevens had this work were never fully addressed by either Tuchman or
by Gail Levin, in her article in the catalog. According to letters that
have surfaced between Russell and his sup-porters at the League, he and
Macdonald-Wright had a falling-out during his visit to LA from 1931 to 1932.
Several League members thought that Macdonald-Wright, who was acting as
Russell's agent in Los Angeles, had not been fairly compensating him for
his paintings. This is probably why Stevens, instead of Macdonald-Wright,
had these pieces and how afterwards Mabel Alvarez became Russell's representative
in Los Angeles. Macdonald-Wright, of course, did not mention any of this
when he wrote about the history of these paintings. This episode was mentioned
in letters of Mabel Alvarez, Chalfant Head, Fred Sexton, and Morgan Russell.

46. Some of the surviving books from the League's library are inscribed
by Stevens; for example, inside of Albert André's Renoir is
the note "LA 9/1/24 To the Art Students League With Best Wishes F.
L. Stevens."

47. Albert King discussed both Wells' and Stevens' generosity in an interview
with Betty Hoag on 10 June 1964, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Herman Cherry mentions them as patrons of Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan
Russell, as well as League students James Redmond, Albert King, and Fred
Sexton; see Cherry, "Los Angeles Revisited," 18.

48. This was probably a common practice among the group: Kirby Temple
re-called Albert King giving him a porcelain head of Lohan after Temple
had posed for and assisted the artist on his mural for the Ventura Community
Church in 1930.

49. Telephone interview with Kirby Temple on 21 March 2002.

50. Letter to the author from Hideo Date postmarked 21 May 2001.

51. His roommates included Wylog Fong, Donald Totten, Benji Okubo, James
Redmond, Charles Davis, and Henry Clausen. Date actually lived at the League
at different times with Fong, Totten, and Okubo; the Spring Street studio
had two twin beds, according to a floor plan Hideo Date sent to the author
in a letter postmarked 15 September 2001.

52. Date letter, 21 May 2001. Most of this work was returned to Los Angeles
in 1999 when the artist donated 190 pieces to the Japanese American National
Museum; a retrospective, largely of his pre-war career, was held at the
museum in 2001. See Karin Higa, Living in Color: The Art of Hideo Date
(Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum and Berkeley: Heyday Books,
2001).

53. This exhibition was mentioned in "Night and Day" by Ted
LeBerthon in the News, Los Angeles, 27 June 1940: Perret Collection,
Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library.

55. Sam Hyde Harris interview with Fidel Danieli, 24 July 1975; tape
on deposit at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

56. The trip is mentioned in the Los Angeles Times, 21 June 1925,
III, 13:2.

57. Brigante/Danieli interview 28 January 1975, tape 2.

58. Their trip was discussed in The Graphic, 2 October 1909, 2:9.

59. Benton sent students to the Los Angeles League as well, such as Archie
Musick, Joe Meert, and Bernard Steffen. Artist model and future rare book
dealer Henry Clausen was the conduit of information between Macdonald-Wright
and his old friend Benton, as Clausen traveled back and forth from coast
to coast modeling for both leagues and worked as a professional wrestler
along the way.

63. It is presently uncertain if George, a.k.a. Gjura, Stojana (1885-1974)
attended the Art Students League, but later he was president of the Modern
Art Workers, an association made up of many League artists, and his name
was mentioned in a couple of Betty Hoag's interviews in the 1960s, so it
seems likely he was somehow associated with the school.

64. Charles P. Austin responded vehemently to Macdonald-Wright's criticism
in a subsequent column and a young Arthur Millier, who was then working
as a dealer, even got into the act by pointing out all of the unheard-of
free publicity the two were generating. See Los Angeles Times 4 March
1923, III, 39:7-8.

65. Los Angeles Times, 18 February 1923, III, 41:3-4.

66. Albert King interview with Betty Hoag on 10 June 1964, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

67. Saturday Night, 7 April 1928, from California Art Club album,
Vol. 1, 1928, on deposit at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

68. Date letter, 26 April 2000.

69. California Art Club, Bulletin IV, no. 4 (April 1928).

70. Los Angeles Times, 28 February 1932, Los Angeles reel 2, frame
544, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. What this critic
failed to recognize was that the group was now following Macdonald-Wright's
more refined Asian-fusion style; see discussion later in this essay.

71. Los Angeles Record, 10 January 1933, 5:7. Herman Cherry discussed
his version of how the gallery started in an interview with Judd Tully on
8 May 1989, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Lorser Feitelson
claimed he designed this gallery for Stanley Rose in 1935. See his interview
with Fidel Danieli on 2 March 1974, Oral History Program, University of
California, Los Angeles.

81. Paul Babcock interview with Betty Hoag on 11 May 1965, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution. The transcription of this interview
has many errors. For example, in this quote the artist's name is incorrectly
given as "McDonald Ray."

82. Clausen, "Recollections of SMW": 56.

83. For example, Feitelson would call Macdonald-Wright a "son of
a bitch" behind his back, while Macdonald-Wright referred to Feitelson's
work at the time, with its brown palette, as "gravy paintings."
Date letter, 26 April 2000.

84. Hideo Date and Benji Okubo, for example, painted similar images of
women in the 1930s, the former in watercolors and the latter in oils, in
which the subject's face is blue or green and the eyes are an intense red.
They were experimenting with Macdonald-Wright's Synchromism, although he
never specifically taught it to them. Previous students might have been
more directly influenced by Macdonald-Wright's publication A Treatise
on Color, written for his League students in 1924; some of them, such
as Mabel Alvarez and Chalfant Head, held on to their copies for the remainder
of their lives. However, Hideo Date said there were no longer any copies
around when he was a student at the school beginning in 1928 (Date letter,
26 April 2006).

85. Work in this style has been identified in oils, pencil drawings,
murals, mosaic murals, lithographs, watercolors, and porcelain.

86. Hideo Date said the League artists working in this Asian-fusion style
were influenced directly by Macdonald-Wright. Letter to the author postmarked
18 August 2001.

88. William H. von Herwig, quoted from the "Independents" catalog
for an ex-hibition held at the Palos Verdes Public Library and Art Gallery,
31 October to 31 December 1933, in possession of the author.

94. Lorser Feitelson interview with Molly Saltman, 1965; tape on deposit
at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. It should be noted
that by this time Nicholas Brigante was somewhat removed from the local
art scene, after a serious accident kept him housebound. Brigante himself
always credited his earlier mentor, Rex Slinkard, with introducing him to
Asian art and said that Macdonald-Wright briefly, during one month in 1923,
helped him to refine his personal goals concerning Asian art. Another one
of Brigante's goals was to raise the watercolor technique to an art form
respected on the same level as oil painting. In fact, his efforts may have
been the real impetus for the watercolor movement that developed in Southern
California in the 1930s and 1940s, an idea that should receive further study.
So while Brigante was no doubt always aware of the activities of Macdonald-Wright
and his followers, he was probably only indirectly influenced by this movement.

95. See Karin Higa's discussion of the influence of nihonga on
this artist, Living in Color, 10-14.

96. This was in the last lecture in the series, dated 24 September 1925,
titled "On the Philosophy of Aesthetics as dictated to the Art Students
League of Los Angeles," transcribed by Mabel Alvarez and housed at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art library.

97. Hideo Date discussed Macdonald-Wright's painting like Renoir, Matisse,
and Cézanne in a letter to the author postmarked 16 September 2002.

100. For a more complete history of the Project in Southern California,
see Marilyn Wyman, "A New Deal for Art in Southern California: Mural
and Sculpture under Government Patronage" (PhD dissertation, University
of Southern California, 1982).

101. Donald Totten discusses the connections between the League and the
Project in his interview with Betty Hoag, 28 May 1964, Archives of American
Art, Smithsonian Institution.

102. The work of Jerre Murray (1904-1973) and Tyrus Wong (b. 1910), for
example, shows influences from the Asian-fusion movement. Neither one attended
the school, although they were both friends with many of the League students.

The above essay was reprinted, without illustrations, in
Resource Library on March 4, 2008 with the permission of the Pasadena
Museum of California Art. Resource Library wishes to extend appreciation
to Jenkins Shannon and Maureen St. Gaudens for their help concerning permissions
for reprinting the above text.

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